A small confession:
Blogging’s a bugger, but there you are. That’s the practical working motto of a working writer with a deadline to meet and no idea what he’s going to write about.
It seems an awful thing to admit, but the way that things get written sometimes, indeed, very often, probably, is by writing just whatever’s on your mind – and, more often than not, it turns out better than some meticulously planned magnum opus from the genius around the corner. Spontaneity still has something to be said for it, apparently.
The Unexpected Pachyderm:
This is what I jokingly refer to as the Elephant of Surprise – it’s the elephant in the room and the element of surprise … thus, the Elephant of Surprise. It sums up what experience ought to have taught us by now, but which ego makes us forget: surprise is vital.
What do I mean by surprise? I mean that you have to be open to being surprised. If you know just exactly what’s going to happen, in every detail, not only is it not going to be much fun to write (and possibly not even that much fun for the reader), but it’s also likely going to be wrong.
To whir is human …
Let me explain. Your subconscious tends to be a much better writer than you are – it’s a writers’ cliché by now. But it sums up, that conscious design loses to subconscious creativity every time.
Not to mention all the little idiosyncratic “imperfections” you lose in the process. It’s those little imperfections, in context, written in the heat of the moment, that give life to what you’ve written, and that, cumulatively, make it as near to perfect as it’s going to be for anything written by human hands.
Dung manifestin’:
The secret to good writing in this context, is that it’s written in context. It’s your honest best at the time. And that, my friends, is the Elephant of Surprise. Please don’t feed him (or her, I’m never sure which) peanuts on the way out – it distracts him (or her), and then I have to take time out of a busy writer’s schedule (I wish) to muck out the stalls.
But then, maybe that’s the writer’s lot – up to your knees in elephant dung with no way out, and then, just when you were ready to throw up your hands in despair, comes the surprise that you weren’t expecting, and nor was the reader, and life is fun again …